This invention relates to a chewing gum product or other comestible with a coating thereon, and in particular to sugarless chewing gum products with a hard coating comprising hydrogenated isomaltulose or other polyols, and methods of making such products.
Chewing gums, including pellet chewing gums, are frequently enclosed with hard or soft coatings. Coatings provide an opportunity for the manufacturer to vary product characteristics such as taste, appearance and nutritional value. In recent years, efforts have been devoted to producing sugarless hard coatings for use in chewing gum. Sugarless coatings which have been investigated include coatings containing compounds such as xylitol, sorbitol, mannitol and hydrogenated starch hydrolysates.
Conventional coating processes for polyols use either an aqueous liquid addition of the polyol, followed by drying, or an aqueous liquid addition plus a dry charge with the polyol, followed by drying.
Sugarless xylitol coated pellet gums have become very popular and products are being manufactured in Europe and Canada. Coating with xylitol is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,105,801, issued Aug. 8, 1978, to Dogliotti; U.S. Pat. No. 4,127,677, issued Nov. 28, 1978, to Fronczowski et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 4,681,766, issued Jul. 21, 1987 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,786,511, issued Nov. 22, 1988, to Huzinec et al.; and U.S. Pat. No. 4,828,845, issued May 9, 1989, to Zamudio-Tena et al.
The most common and lowest costing polyol used in chewing gum is sorbitol. However, panning with sorbitol has been very difficult since it is hygroscopic and does not readily crystallize. A number of patents have been published that use various procedures to coat with sorbitol, including U.K. Patent No. 2,115,672; U.S. Pat. No. 4,317,838; and U.S. Pat. No. 4,753,790. A successful sorbitol hard coating was reported in U.S. Pat. No. 4,423,086, particularly when the sorbitol was at least 99% D-sorbitol. However, the quality of coating never approached the quality of typical xylitol hard coatings.
Another coating patent, U.S. Pat. No.4,840,797, discloses the use of maltitol in a coating. Again, a high purity in the maltitol (over 95%) was required in order to obtain a good quality coating on pellet gum. Also hydrogenated isomaltulose is disclosed as a coating material in PCT Patent Publication No. W097/08958 and U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,478,593; 5,270,061; 5,248,508; 4,792,453; and 4,317,838.
In many of the coating processes, the liquid polyol may become tacky when it is applied to the coating bed and begins to dry. To reduce tack, the powdered polyol is applied to quickly dry the coating before it becomes too tacky. This is commonly referred to as dry charging. When a large amount of dry powder is added to a liquid mixture to help dry the coating, a soft shell results and is sometimes called soft panning. When mostly hot liquid syrups containing pure polyols are used and dried with air, crystals are formed that are hard and crunchy. This is called hard panning. Sometimes dry charging can be used in hard panning, but is usually very limited in the amount of dry charge material and used for a few applications during the process.
One of the difficulties with forming a quality coating is that it takes a long time to apply and dry the multiple coats of liquid used to build up the coating on the product. The use of a dry charge helps build up the coating quickly, thus reducing manufacturing time, but generally makes it more difficult to get a high quality coating and particularly a hard crunchy coating with good appearance. This has been particularly true when hydrogenated isomaltulose is used to create a coating on a chewing gum pellet. Other polyols such as xylitol can be used to coat pellets in about 2-4 hours in a side vented pan. Hydrogenated isomaltulose coating takes about 5-6 hours for the same production size of batch using the same production equipment. Therefore it would be a great improvement to be able to apply a coating on a product in a reduced amount of time, yet having a high quality appearance.